In 2012, Berg released Little Printer. It was all IoT and cute–I wish I had one.

Sadly, Berg shut its doors a couple years later and with it went the servers that powered all those Little Printers.

Now, thanks to the hard work of the Little Printer community, the back end has been recreated and open-sourced. Nord Projects has also created a new interface to control them.

There’s a lesson to be learned here about the connected part of these connected products. If it’s gone, will the product continue to work? In a lot of cases, the answer is “no”. The people at Nord write a bit this in Resilient Products.

As if people need another reason to keep eyes affixed to their phone, Google now has a live view feature. I especially like the on screen safety message warning users to “…keep your phone down while you walk”.

I’m not sure how effective this sort of augmented reality display is if the phone isn’t held up. It seems like it might be even less safe to hold it at waist or chest level. Maybe it’s better to pull over when looking at your phone, even while walking.